Lester Leaps In: No Eyes: Lester Young

As a jazz-loving teenager in San Francisco, I tuned into KJAZ every Sunday
night to hear a weekly tribute show to the late Lester Young, Prez, as he
was known, the president of the tenor sax. The charming host of the show,
Bob Houlihan, was a stone-cold Lester Young junkie. At that point in my
life, I don't believe I'd ever heard one human being consistently express
so much passionate enthusiasm for another, and it was Houlihan's ardor, as
much as Young's music, that got me to tune in.

It so happened that I liked Lester Young fine. I enjoyed his solos with
the Basie band, particularly his subtle work behind Billie Holiday. I
loved the story of his legendary jam session with tenor giant Coleman
Hawkins in Kansas City-the jazz world's inversion of the tortoise and the
hare, in which the sleek, light-toned Prez outcooled the hard-blowing,
majestic Hawk. I understood Lester's profound influence on a generation of
musicians, and I believe I was even hip to the metaphoric properties of his
style: that a bit of subtlety, a swerve of indirection might get you home
in a more elegant and beguiling way. But I was never as knocked out by
Prez as I was by Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Lacking their clear
virtuosity and harmonic inventiveness, Prez was probably too subtle for me.

But people who had the Lester Young fever had it bad. A professor in grad
school told me that he began studying the tenor sax in his fifties just so
that he might play a phrase or two before he died that sounded like Prez.
Imitation as a form of adoration is even more common to jazz than it is to
writing, and Lester Young may have had more professional imitators than
anybody besides Bird.

David Meltzer's book-length poem, No Eyes: Lester Young (Black
Sparrow),
is written in imitation of Young's noted use of hipster language. He spoke
in a code language of his own, in hopes of keeping most of the world at
arm's length. Meltzer views his project as a "prolonged meditation on the
last year of Lester Young's life." (Much has been written, by the way, about
the final years of Prez's life-the alcoholic tenor man died in 1959, at age
fifty, in a miserable
New York hotel called the Alvin-and the Dexter Gordon film, "Round
Midnight," was based on Young's last years. The best portrait of Prez's
late years that I've read is Bobby Scott's magnificent essay "The House in
the Heart," which is available in Robert Gottlieb's omnibus Reading
Jazz.)

Meltzer prefaces his poetic enactment with a dissertation on the title
term, "No Eyes," and then waxes symbolic about his enterprise with the
following paragraph: "The metaphor of creation and negation, of despair's art
and the art of
melancholy, haunt this poem. It's about death and Young sits in as a
metaphor for an imaginary (yet acknowledgeably great) artist living and
dying for and with his art."

The long, uneven poem does have its moments. I had no trouble giving
myself to the following crafted and imaginative passage:

if exhaustion were an ocean

I'd dive in head first

& forget how to swim

down to the deepest deep

creep along bottom's bottom

& sleep w/out dreaming

turn blue in salt cold

shrink old prune gray

water filled folds pop open

on sunny days

no more sweet or sour

just hour after hour of no time

is nobody's time w/ nobody around

if misery were the sea

& blues were the sky

I'd still sink and fly. . . .

But much of the poem reads to me like an automatic, loosey-goosey,
second-string beat riff, in which anything goes:

Lester's insouciance was cool

a word that's lost all coolness

laidbackness

its power to defuse & confuse

diffused in Netscape blips & MTV

hip hop flip flop meager wages

surface glare & glide

slide easy digital tic toc

cool clock cool time

everything's so fucking cool

bodies float up on vicious poolside pane

shot through fiberoptic hairstrands

Prez adrift saunters off the bandstand

across the street in a reet

buzz of blue serge words.

Come to think of it, I really like those last two lines. So I'll be seeing
you "across the street in a reet/ buzz of blue serge words."

Bart Schneider is the authof of Blue Bossa (Viking); both he and David
Meltzer participated in the JJA on-line forum "Re: Jazz and Fiction."
Schneider is the editor of the on-line periodical Book Bag, where this "riff
on Prez" first appeared -- to Subscribe to Book Bag, send a blank message
with "subscribe" in the subject field to: bookbag@winternet.com.